To Handpainted Chinaware
Distorted ducks, smirking women and potshaped blossoms
Fastened to pale plates, you are dreary symbols of those who painted you.
O ducks, you were made by women
Who sway in and out of the waters of life,
Content to catch morsels of food from birds flying overhead.
And you smirking women, were painted by men
Who unrolled little souls on plates,
Gave them faces which could not quite hide their ugliness ...
You alone almost baffle me, potshaped blossoms—
Were you fashioned by childless women, who made you the infants
Denied them by life?
Study of a Face
Her forehead is the wind-colored, sun-stilled wall of a country church.
Trailing cloud-shudders overhead narrow it to a thin band of vague light:
Two tarnished, exultant cerements of earth—cheeks—meet it,
And the three speak clearly, languidly.